Businesses store information describing various entities associated with the business and actions related to these entities, for example, various products and services, inventory of the business, transactions, employee information, and so on. Personnel associated with a business often like to view reports representing the business data. For example, a sales executive could like to view reports describing sales information for different products for different regions. A human resources person could like to see reports describing employee information, payroll information, and so on.
Various vendors provide reporting systems for generating reports based on the business data. Reporting systems often require data to be represented in a particular format for purposes of generating reports. However, businesses represent and store information to support their business processes and transactions. The representation of information available from a business may not be suitable for purposes of reporting. Furthermore, a business may not store all the information needed for purposes of reporting. For example, a reporting system may need historical information for generating reports, for example, quarterly or annual reports. However, a business information system may only be able to provide the current information available in the system and not historical information.
As a result, business systems may have to be modified to be able to support reporting systems. This requires businesses to use experts to process their information and enhance their systems to be able to utilize reporting system capabilities. As a result, businesses end up spending significant time, money, and resources in processing their information for purposes of reporting.